The Dream of the City Read Online Free

to the bone since I was fourteen. And we only have enough for this.” He raised his spoon with a sliver of carrot floating inside. “Guillermo is smart and he could go far if he studied, but since we don’t have a spare cent to our names, he won’t be able to take the examinations for the university, and he’ll end up in the bay with me, breaking his back every day to be able to eat potatoes for the rest of his life.”
    â€œI won’t work in the bays,” the boy interrupted, with a convinced air. “Father Flotats says I can be whatever I want to be. So don’t worry, I won’t go to work with you.”
    Dimas looked at his brother and fell silent, seeing his face full of innocence. He ruffled his already unkempt hair and answered: “You’re right. Sometimes I talk nonsense.”
    â€œSo it could be you’re a little dumb, don’t you think?” the child said with a roguish smile, leaving Dimas no option but to smile back.
    â€œA little bit, he is,” Juan added, jovial now as well. And he cut a large slice of bread for each of them and considered the argument ended.
    Guillermo was right, his father thought. Dimas wasn’t a bad kid, but he was fed up. For years Juan had tried to instill in his son the virtues of respect, love of hard work, and the importance of a steady job, and though he knew without a doubt that these principles had stuck, he often noticed that the young man seemed to live in a permanent state of dissatisfaction. It reminded him of how he was as a young man, when he refused to stick it out in the village and ignored the protests of his family, rebelling at the thought of carrying on with his existence in that hovel far from any progress or opportunity to prosper.
    But now everything was different, or that’s what Juan believed. In his eyes, Dimas had never known real hunger, real misery, and maybe he didn’t appreciate what he had.
    Regardless, it was undeniable was that he found his son’s perennial dissatisfaction discomfiting. It reminded him of Raúl, and he was afraid that Dimas would one day follow in his brother’s footsteps and do something crazy, ending up as Raúl did . Keeping the smile on his face, Juan grasped his spoon more forcefully. He refused to think that something bad could occur that would disturb the security of their already fragile home.

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