Alfredo doesn't wish you good morning. You hear his voice in the dark: "traer la carretilla" "-bring the wheelbarrow". The cock is crowing and the church bells ring six times.
I'm out sweating within ten minutes and we keep going - me mixing the cement, Alfredo laying the bricks and pipes - until lunch time, then again until sunset. Alfredo says it takes 200 batches until you get the mix just right, but I feel like after thirty I could probably, in fact sometimes do, mix cement in my sleep. My lower back is strong as an iron rod. I wish I'd been taught all this at school. Common sense you can't teach, though, so sometimes Alfredo will walk over and knock something loose with one blow I'd been scratching away at for twenty minutes. We don't speak while we work. Rarely after. All I hear is the work, the occasional thump of lemons falling from the tree and Alfredo calling out "dame mescla" "- give me cement". Once he advised me to buy a mirror so I could comb my hair. "But I can't really brush my thick hair," I told him "it's much too," "…ridiculous" he interjected. I laughed, but it wasn't a joke. Alfredo doesn't tell jokes. He's a simple kind of man who shouts instead of talking. He has an army crewcut done by his wife, a chipped front tooth and calls me his peon, which suits me just fine. His eyes lit up one afternoon when I told him I'd been to Colombia: "Are they really like this...?" he asked, gesturing with his hands. It was the first time I'd seen him smile - it took him quite a while to stop. And, yes, to see it just one more time, that dark smile from a Samaria’s bright eyes, I swear I’d rip out my heart and hold it above a flame. By the time the sun goes down I'm so drained that, after two beers, I'm more or less gone. A cool breeze rolls in down over the hills and sitting in the plaza the old men play cards and dominos and talk about whose cousin that is walking by and whose father is in the hospital and what their daughter-in-law's making for dinner tomorrow and who and what and did and will. The old ladies bring me tomatoes and oranges and inspect my house. By evening everyone in the plaza's asking me where I got the stove, the bedsheets. They struggle to walk upright, some of the old ladies, but wash their clothes in the old stone lavados five times faster than I can. I feel at home here in the valley. Surrounded by the hills and honest people, working hard myself. I'd like to write a poem about the workers, rising earlier than monks; how they take themselves less seriously and drink Gran Duque for breakfast and sweat it out in the fields later; and how this is the real work, the real way to integrate body and mind; I'd like to know the history of the valley and write about how the bread arrives at the table, to put the the gravel-sound of the spade on paper, and the pointlessness of doing anything other than living it.
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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