The workmen came today to begin the job of tearing up our bathroom. The foreman departed right after he gave directions to the young fellow he left here by himself. In about 4 hours the kid had gotten everything stripped away: wallpaper, sheetrock, insulation, sink, faucets, countertop, toilet bowl and tank, light fixtures, hardwood floor.
Everything had been piled onto the back of the battered pickup parked outside.
At the moment, the bathroom looks as it might have looked in the final phase of the construction of this house, thirty-some years ago.
The workman (the one I call 'the kid') speaks very little English, and my high-school Spanish is woefully inadequate in dealing with the rapid-fire Spanish a native speaker speaks. One wonders whether Spanish is always rendered in this rapid-fire fashion, as when the foreman talks to the kid. Once in a while, fooling with the television remote, I may chance upon a Spanish-language channel. Usually the program is a variety show which includes comic skits performed by chubby mustachioed men in checked jackets and beautiful young women in absurdly skimpy clothing. The jokes exchanged are very, very rapid-fire. Judging from the laughter and applause, the studio audience does not miss any of them.
The kid asks if he can use my phone to call his foreman on the latter's cell phone. "Teléfono" is not hard to recognize. I understand that the job is done, at least for today, and the kid would like to know when the foreman will be coming to pick him up. The pickup outside is not his, and so he can't drive it. He can only load it with the debris, which the foreman will eventually take to the dump.
The kid says, "Cuarenta minutos." Forty minutes. Okay, so he waits. Forty minutes becomes an hour, then ninety minutes. The kid asks again for the teléfono. He is apologetic, this kid, and patient besides. He has had no lunch, and I have nothing to offer him except a banana. Gracias, señor, he says.
The foreman finally shows up. He inspects the job. His cell phone rings two or three times in the five minutes of the inspection. Evidently he has other jobs going simultaneously, and our bathroom is just one small piece of his world.
They are coming back early tomorrow. I hope the kid brings a lunch box with him.
A compendium of images - most original, some not - words, and links, sometimes musical, gathered for the exclusive enjoyment of friends and relatives, some old, and some new.
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