The Dream of the City Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’m working on. I’ve tightened the same screw three times.”
    â€œWell, keep tightening it. Pruna’s told me he wants you looking like a tableau vivant, like the goddamned pastorets .”
    â€œAs 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.
    â€œEveryone 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