The Dream of the City Read Online Free Page A

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.