The Dream of the City Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œSoon 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.”
    â€œWhy wait, Montero?” a gigantic man asked, interrupting his speech.
    â€œWhy wait, Ramiro? Tell me, how many children do you have?”
    â€œNext month the sixth will be born, God willing.”
    â€œAnd how long are you ready to hold out without pay? How many weeks can you go without putting food on the table?”
    Ramiro lowered his head and fell silent. Everyone looked at one another, but this time there wasn’t a trace of joking on their faces. Each of them knew what he had at home, whether he could afford to put a shank in the soup every day or there were more potatoes than meat. It was Daniel Montero’s word: They had to wait. But it couldn’t be too long. They were all indignant over the extra hours, the pay that never went up, the cold, the worn-out clothes, the withered faces of their wives when they arrived home, the big, bright eyes of the children, their sons and daughters, looking at them … The impatient desire to change things swelled in the breasts of those men like the irritating, frigid breeze that blew through the winter days. The moment to begin the strike was near.

CHAPTER 3
    Laura Jufresa had been in Rome since September of 1913. She had arrived fascinated by the idea of living in that marvelous city where every nook and cranny, every flagstone, could be considered a monument and an homage to the origins of the ancestral culture of the Mediterranean.
    For nearly a thousand years, Rome had been the richest and grandest city of the West, an eternal city, without a doubt, and with every step Laura took through those streets, her feeling of admiration was confirmed. She seemed to see, at least until her senses were overwhelmed, the movements of history and the grandeur accumulated through the centuries.
    And yet, though she admired the city and was overwhelmed by it, by the imposing Colosseum, a giant of the past that recalled the epic, bloody battles between the gladiators, or the Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo, which exposed so many of the Bible’s mysteries there in the Apostolic Palace, everything continued to seem foreign to her. She couldn’t come to grips with her feelings through mere admiration or by simple contemplation. She needed physical contact, to feel the cold stone beneath her hand and then to transform it into warm flesh, authentic sensation, to caress a smooth relief, to make a mark with a paintbrush, to immerse herself in truth, in art.
    Now, in March of 1914, she thought of how lucky she