The Dream of the City (3 page)

CHAPTER 2

At six in the morning the next day, the sun had still not given any sign of its presence. In the sleepy city, the short, cold days monotonously followed one after another. The cobblestones were covered with the morning dew, which seemed to settle on his eyelids as well. Dimas Navarro, squeezed into his corduroy cap, with the collar of his jacket pulled up past his chin and his hands in his shredded pockets, walked toward the streetcar bays. As he approached, the noise of other footsteps chimed in. When they entered, every employee already knew what to do, where to go, all with the same dark determination scored into their faces. They seemed to act like strangers, but perhaps it was just they were so used to living side by side that a mere glance sufficed for a greeting. Weariness flew about their heads like a ferocious scavenger bird. The sun struggled to appear, but the sky finally did light up with a metallic glimmer.

The bays in Horta consisted of a number of adjacent buildings in the Arabian style. The largest was the one containing the streetcars themselves, where the vehicles from lines 45 and 46 were stored and readied for daily use. Beyond this building were others holding the workshops of the painters and carpenters and the offices. The rest of the structures housed the substation, the capacitors, the storage areas, the gas generators, and the pumps. What there was not, however, was a dining hall where the workers could enjoy their midday meal; as a result, the majority of them scattered out onto the courtyard or to the surrounding farm fields and vegetable gardens. Sometimes, at midday, they could be seen strolling in the vicinity of the few country houses that still remained there, holding out against the new-style buildings that had recently been built or the worker housing that went up from one day to the next. There they would meet day laborers and seasonal workers, people who didn't even have the good fortune of a regular salary. They moved like shadows without a destination amid the marshlands and dusty ravines of a city still not yet completed, looking for some occupation to fill their days.

Nor did the workers have a place to change their clothes: There was only an empty space beside a water tank with a couple of taps in a courtyard to wash up. Most of them left home already in their uniforms, and in wintertime, they waited until they got home to clean up. Most people had simple charcoal stoves in their homes where they could heat their water.

Inside the depot, the space was divided into six tracks where a great number of vehicles were lined up. Toward the end of the bay, set aside against the blackened wall, lay rusty pantographs, different colored doors taken from their hinges, an endless array of panes of glass, some rectangular, all looking utterly useless out of their frames. In that dead zone in the bay were both the new parts destined to be mounted promptly and the broken or old ones that needed to be replaced.

In the various sections, the workers got started with whatever job they'd been assigned. Most of them had been employed there for years; they either worked on the damaged vehicles, on the cleaning and preparation of those that would be running that day—the maintenance according to the rules set out by the manufacturer—or on implementing some improvement or other that had been made, usually very slowly, to the older models.

The feeling was of nonstop activity, but since the workers were isolated from one another, it created the strange impression that some were destroying what others had just created. All were busy putting together and taking apart, repainting, filing, and lubricating the various parts, alone or in small groups spread through the different work areas. The movement seemed utter anarchy, as if each person were devoted solely to what appealed to his interests.

But in fact it wasn't like that; each worker was following precise instructions that had to be obeyed without the least argument. Punctually, the streetcars departed from the hangar and went out, amid horrid shrieking, into the burning luminosity of the street, which contrasted sharply with the greasy, metallic shadows of the interior. The workday, from six in the morning until six in the evening, stretched past its appointed time every day, because there was always some urgent job to be finished. The extra hours piled up with the promise to the workers that they would be paid in the near future, when the accounts of the business permitted. And those accounts were never squared away, despite the brand-new combustion-motor car that the manager of the company arrived to the office in every day .

Added to all this was one critical factor: Ever since 1911, when the different streetcars in the city had been brought together into the same company—the Belgian firm Tramways de Barcelona—the newest models had been reserved for the lines that passed through the center and the elevated zones, leaving the older ones for the outer areas, like the 45 and 46, which Dimas worked on and which his father had worked on as well.

Dimas Navarro was working hard on his job in maintenance. He was finishing lubricating the steering mechanism of a streetcar, which allowed it to glide smoothly along the rails. If it wasn't responsive, it could even make the wheel jump out of the groove. The young man was a competent employee; he knew how important maintenance was, especially of the cable tractors, which had already been in service for many years. Daniel Montero, the foreman, came over and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Navarro, leave what you're doing and go help Pons and his crew install the screens and windows in the new 400s.”

“Sure, I'll finish this and I'll go,” Dimas answered without leaving his task.

“No, go now. There's no rush with this machine.”

“But …”

“But what, Navarro? Should we sit here arguing about it the whole morning long? They're orders from above, you know that …” Montero made a gesture as though zipping his mouth shut.

Dimas stepped away from the tram and put his tools in a corner covered in soot, cleaned his hands with a rag that hung from his belt, and turned without complaining. There was no point in arguing with the foreman.

Daniel Montero was a tall man with tan skin. His face was always impeccably shaved and he was extremely thin. His dark eyes flickered like an electric storm and few men could hold out against his stare in a challenge or an argument. Maybe that was why they'd made him foreman, even though everyone knew that he had made contact with the secret unions some time back and, according to some, had still not broken his ties to them. He wasn't cruel or arbitrary, but he was tough. No worker dared to go against his wishes, least of all because he never assigned anyone a task that wasn't necessary. Anyone who was asked would say he was fair, and for that reason, almost everyone respected his opinion.

Dimas, however, was one of the exceptions. He saw a tinge of superiority in the foreman's eyes, and he didn't care for it. At times he observed a contempt for his coworkers that clashed with Montero's clandestine employment as spokesman for their widespread discontents. With fancy words that always struck Dimas as hollow, the foreman tried to impose ideas that surpassed his authority and even his understanding. As far as the job went, his opinions seemed to be law both for the bosses, who obviously knew nothing of his support for the workers' struggles, and for the laborers themselves, who admired him for being better than them and still continuing to defend their rights.

Dimas stepped away and joined Pons and his crew. Pons had worked there the longest of any of the men. Dimas soon understood the reasons behind the foreman's harrying him: Héctor Ribes i Pla, the manager of the company, was there, along with Pruna, the head of the workshop, and another unobtrusive-looking gentleman in a tie. They were showing around a fourth person, a man sporting a large mustache and holding his hat behind his back, as if he were paying a quick visit. No sooner were words spoken than the unobtrusive man translated the words of Ribes i Pla and Pruna. He was speaking French, low pitched, with guttural sounds that strafed the air. The man with the mustache must have been Belgian, maybe a director from the new company there to visit the different bays spread throughout the city.

“Here they make you work, whether you want to or not,” Pons affirmed softly, so that only his coworkers heard him.

“We're not zoo animals,” another one said.

“Easy, boys; even if the Belgian doesn't understand, the other three aren't idiots,” Pons said, feeling a bit uncomfortable in his position. The man reminded Dimas of his father, and in fact they had been friends, though they hadn't seen each other for some time.

“Idiots no, but ass kissers, I'd have to say yes. …”

“Look, it's just for a moment, I don't think Señor Mustache wants to spend the whole morning here,” Pons said to calm them down. “And if he does, who really cares? A little song and dance, a little formality, and that's that.”

“We won't even be able to stop to stretch our legs. My back is killing me after being bent over so long and I'm done with what I'm working on. I've tightened the same screw three times.”

“Well, keep tightening it. Pruna's told me he wants you looking like a tableau vivant, like the goddamned
pastorets
.”

“As long as I don't have to play the Virgin Mary,” a worker named Arnau commented.

The rest of them broke out in laughter that was immediately snuffed out by the enraged expression of Pons.

“Everyone shut up; we're walking a thin line here. When the day's over, you can joke around as much as you wish, but for now, I don't want to hear another stupid word.”

The two workers looked at each other sardonically. Arnau mimicked Pons's outburst to Dimas as soon as Pons had turned around: He looked like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum.

Soon the Belgian was gone and the rest of the day passed with grueling normality, the harshness and exhaustion characteristic of workdays that never end. In addition to the nonstop work, there was the cold to contend with, blowing in through the windowpanes, broken by boys throwing rocks, and wandering through the bay like an ever-present threat.

Most of the time Dimas spent in the workshop was devoted to thinking. He pondered and calculated, planning how to escape from that schedule, that daily litany of footfalls over the cobblestones before the crack of dawn. With all his strength, he longed to leave behind those sunup-to-sundown shifts with their paltry paydays that he could never stretch as far as they needed to go, no matter how he tried. Soon it would be fourteen years he'd worked in that company: half his life. When his father got him in there with the help of a friend, it was one promise after another: “If you're patient …” “If you only wait …” But for Dimas the years passed by mercilessly; he was no longer a novice, and yet they still treated him like one, like another dim-witted worker, a hand, grist for the mill. And he saw no way of rising in a workshop where all the good posts had already been handed out and there never seemed to be a spot left open for him, a person ill-inclined to chitchatting and faked camaraderie and shameless kowtowing to higher-ups.

He believed—he knew—that he deserved more. Above all else, he needed to be valued.

Sometimes he stopped to ask himself where this need had come from. Sometimes it struck him that it had arisen after seeing for so many years how his father tried to get by with his extreme humility, that exaggerated fear of sticking out from the crowd, whether for doing well or doing badly.

Dimas loved his father, and day after day he had been there to witness his struggle, his fall, his disgrace, how life had bowed him over and broken him through heartaches, disappointments, and grievances he didn't deserve. Juan was a good man and Dimas respected him. Some nights, just before bed, his father would lower his guard and justify his acquiescence, his unwillingness to go on fighting, his prostration before destiny, his acceptance of defeat, but Dimas wasn't planning on going through the same. He didn't want to end up that way. He couldn't.

At this stage of his life, Dimas was convinced that patience would accomplish nothing. The only sure thing that came from resignation was winding up one day in the grave. And it wasn't enough for him to earn a little pocket change for beer or to go to the bullring in Barceloneta … No, he told himself, he wouldn't settle for that; he wouldn't accept halfway measures to get by, wouldn't swallow those little consolations meant to cover up the sting of poverty. He wanted to come home fresh, not ground to nothing by work, his skin thick with oil and sweat, feeling like a piece of machinery that would end up in the scrap heap once it had served its function. Like his father. He was tired of that endless weariness, being too exhausted even to think, waking up every morning feeling just as he had the night before, each week the same as the last, as if he were a prisoner carrying out a sentence.

When he looked up, he saw others like himself, men swathed in the same misery, with the same sorry routines. But he felt different from the rest.

They all shared the same tedium, but Dimas was convinced that one of these days, an opportunity would come for him to leave that oppressive world behind, that world of meaningless things that piled up before him like an impassable mountain. And if it didn't, he would search for it, try his luck to change his life instead of just letting it pass him by.

He owed it to himself, to his strength, to his daring, worn down as they were, to his father with his defeat, to Guillermo with his intelligence; he thought of him as a brother, and the boy deserved a better future.

At lunchtime, the general discontent came out. Daniel Montero, the foreman who called the workers under him “comrades,” had come down from watching over them. He tried to lift their spirits with promises of effective action.

“Soon we'll be in a position to strike. We need to wait for the moment when we can cause the owner the most damage. Up 'til now, the shipments have been staggered, but rumor has it that soon we'll be getting a very important one: They'll send us the old trains from Brussels and Liege to be renovated. When they arrive, we'll strike and we'll hold our ground.”