On the scaffolding of the neighboring building, some men work. I see them when I go out on the balcony, but I hear them during the day. They make a great noise with an infernal machine, a hydraulic hammer that will have some function in the reform of the façade. At lunchtime, one of them is left alone. Athletic, black, seated on the highest plank of the scaffolding, he gobbles down food from a lunch box, resting from the noise and effort, observing the avenue.
Watching it, I have thought about the masons of my childhood and the hunger they made me feel when they sat down to eat in a corner of the street, protected by the pile of sand they sifted for the cement. Stunned, he watched them. At breakfast, fried beans with bacon or a piece of blood sausage on a slice of white bread. For lunch, cabbage and potato passed through the pan with a few cloves of garlic. Every once in a while, a drink of very watered down wine. They chewed slowly and contentedly. That was what made me most envious, since there were so many of us in my house and we ate too quickly, huddled together in the kitchen around a cracked marble table. We talked a lot and loudly, like in Italian neorealism films. The masons, on the other hand, ate lunch in the street in silence, slowly, with worker sobriety, looking into infinity, sitting on the ground with a Caliphate gesture. It was strange, they lacked a table and, practically, cutlery. They generally just used the razor; but they impressed me by the absent, sure, categorical air with which they mastered the public space.
Like them, the young black man on the scaffolding, who must be the lowest paid on the job, has taken over the building. From above, he dominates the avenue along which the cars and pedestrians who, coming from the past, fear the future so much. He knows that the future, good or bad, is his. He eats with the indifference of a statue.
