On the scaffolding in front, men working. I see them when I go out on the balcony, but I feel them throughout the day. They make a lot of noise with an infernal machine, a hydraulic hammer that I don’t know what function it must have on the facade they are restoring. At lunch time, one of them is left alone. Athletic, black, sitting on the highest plank of the scaffolding, he forks the food from a lunchbox, resting from the noise and effort, looking at the avenue.
Seeing it, I thought of the popsicles of my childhood and the hunger they made me feel when they sat down to eat on a street corner, protected by the pile of sand they sifted for cement. I kept looking at them. For breakfast, they cut a stick of black sausage on top of a slice of white bread. For lunch, sauteed cabbage and potato with a clove of garlic or refried beans with bacon. From time to time, a sip of wine heavily soaked in water. They chewed with a slow, satisfied posture. This was what made me the most envious, since there were many of us at my house and we ate too quickly, piled in the kitchen, around a cracked marble table. We talked a lot and in a high tone, like in the films of Italian neorealism. Everyone wanted to be heard.
The masons, on the other hand, ate their lunch in the street in silence, slowly, with a worker’s sobriety, looking at infinity, sitting on the ground in a caliphal pose. It was strange, they had no table and practically no cutlery, they generally only used the razor; but I was impressed by the absent, confident, categorical air with which they taught themselves about the public space.
Like them, the black boy on the scaffolding, who must be the lowest paid on the job, has taken over the building. From above, it dominates the avenue where 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.
